About the project

We started pre-production for this project sometime in the first half of 2025. This was the first major project that I worked on with Midge Munster.

Location

We primarily shot the film with our core cast at Vaile Mansion in Independence, Missouri. They were great to work with and we were able to do a lot of our exterior shots without rental fee, which was super helpful to the final product.

Gear

The entire film was shot on the Red Komodo (Mavic 2 pro for drone shots). For glass, I used DZO Vespid 75mm, 50mm, and 24mm. I was really happy overall with the DZO Vespid series. I didn’t run any matte boxes or filters for this special. I tried to run as lean as possible.

Lighting was a beast on this production. We shot all of our Vaile interior shots in 8 hours. This included loading in and out of the Vaile Mansion. I lit both from the inside and out and often multiple rooms. I ran my GVM 500B’s for exterior day light coming through the windows in most of the shots. Inside I used the GVM 2 by 2 Flexible light mat, aputure mcs, gvm 300ws, Neewer 220w rgb, Neewer fs300c and other smaller lights.

Audio was ran by Shirin Felfeli or Mack Trumble (whoever I could beg to come hold a boom on that day). It was just a sennheiser mke600 running through a boom into a Zoom f3. Super lean, but got the job done. My audio team did a great job despite having no clue what they were doing.